Patty Martin: So I’m Patty Martin interviewing John Trudell.
John Trudell: Hello Patty.
So, I have a couple questions for you, and mainly about youth and the messages you want to send to the youth.
Well, I hadn’t thought in terms of anything as a message. But what I would say to young people is basically what I would say to anybody, because I think we’re as human beings, we’re all equally at risk in this world, just the same as we’re all equally entitled to joy, so to speak, alright, but I think, but because youth are younger yet and they got a longer time to be here, right, I think that it would be very important that they understand the value of their intelligence. And that young people understand, you know to use their intelligence as clearly and coherently as they can. To think before they act. To think about things. And you know, to think. And recognize as much about the issue that they’re dealing with as they possibly can. To see things for what they are. Because too many times we’ve been programmed to emotionally react to situations and we generally react based upon our beliefs and what we believe. So then something happens and we react with how we believe. By how we believe. And I think that’s what helped to create the mess that the world is in today. Because if you’re reacting out of emotion and beliefs, then that means–you can’t have emotional reaction and clear and coherent thought at the same time. One is at the expense of the other. And I think for young people to understand the value of their intelligence, I would just, I don’t know how coherent I’m being with this, but that is what I would say. Understand the value of your intelligence and your own worth.
So how can youth or all of us obtain clarity of mind after being programmed by this other system and living in this political world in general?
Well, I think one thing, one of the basic things to me about clarity of mind. It’s gotta [be] about common sense. What makes sense. See if something doesn’t make sense to you, then don’t rationalize and hunt for ways to get it to make sense. If it doesn’t make sense, right, it doesn’t make sense. Now there may be things in life that appear, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. But if you really think about it, not through your emotions and your beliefs, but think, think about it recognize it, you know, just think as clearly as you can about things before you do them. But in the end, if a thing makes sense, it’s worth pursuing. If it doesn’t make sense, then don’t go there. Especially like in the political, economic, religious environment that we’re in now. None of it makes sense, alright. I mean to me anyway. I’ll speak for me. But none of it really makes any sense to me. So I try to think in ways that do make sense to me. And not get lost in trying to make sense out of something that doesn’t make sense. Because it’s a trap. Most of the citizens in this industrial reality are trying to make sense out of things that don’t make sense. They’re not going with what intuitively and instinctively, you know, a more coherent way to deal with things.
In order to be like making sense or just to acknowledge and try to determine what’s going on in our lives. How should youth sort of face the growing threats, like the military is sorta posing on us or gangs or drugs or that kind of stuff?
Well, I mean you’re young and you’re starting into this. It’s the system itself. The military is a part of the system, alright. The economics are part of the system. The politics are part of the system. You know, and how that breaks down into gangs, drugs or whatever, there’s something about the system itself that doesn’t make any sense. Alright, and at some point in our lives we all have to deal with it. Right, so how to deal with it, I think first, we have to go internally within ourselves. You know, understand that you are a human being and understand the value of being a human being, and understand the value of your intelligence. Knowing how much power that we have. You’re young. See, so this shouldn’t really apply to you, but I got a feeling that it does. How insecure and bad can you make yourself feel? How low can your self esteem get? See, and at your age this shouldn’t even be an issue. But if it is an issue then something really–However bad one can make oneself feel through your fears and your doubts and your insecurities, well, that’s power. That’s your power, alright. But we’ve been programmed to use our power like that and sit around and believe that we don’t have any power. You know, and it’s something about straightening that. Understand your own value. We do have power. We’ve just been programmed to perceive ourselves negatively. And what I’m saying, there is no reason for us to perceive ourselves negatively. Whoever programmed that to us, they did it because they’re incoherent right and they’re not clear and somebody programmed it into them right and so that’s all they know. So they program it to us. And whatever happens to you in your life, it’s an experience. Don’t judge your life, experience it, and in the course to that if there are experiences you have that are not the most positive, right, well, don’t judge it, but you look at it so that you can recognize what happened. You will learn from it. And you can maybe deflect it from happening again, because most people they judge their lives and their experiencees so they don’t learn anything from it, and it just keeps happening over and over and over again. But at the very essence, the very heart of it, there’s nothing wrong with any of you. You didn’t do anything, no matter what anybody says, you didn’t do anything alright, other than to be born into a chaotic, incoherent perceptional reality. And that’s all you did was be born into it. You didn’t bring any bad to it, and you haven’t contributed any bad to it. But I think most young people at a very early age alright, get something put into their heads that there’s something wrong with them. And there’s not anything wrong with you, except that we’ve been programmed to perceive reality in that we’re bringing the negative. There’s something wrong with us. Our responsibility as human beings, and we have the ability to go with it, because that’s what our intelligence brings with us right. It is to recognize the reality of life, not to judge it. To recognize, and to recognize means that we use our minds to look at a thing as many ways as we possibly can. Look at it from every way that we can through our thinking process. See in this will help us define clear and coherent ways to deal. Because the practical reality is all the problems that are in this world that we’re confronted with now, there are no solutions. The way that it stands now, there are no solutions. Contradiction now. But there is one solution, and that solution is we can think our way through it. But we have to bring clarity and coherency. See we can change. We have to create the answers. See we can create the solutions to what’s going on depending on how clearly and coherently we think. In my generation, really, there’s very little thinkin going on in my generation. We’re not a generation of thinkers and we’re not you know and I just don’t mean that observationally, our intentions were good, and our motives may have been good and all that, so let’s just say we had all good, good rationalisations and justifications for what we were doing, but we didn’t think our way through it. We just behaved the way the generation before it programmed us to behave. So we were against war and for the environment, we were all the right stuff in a way we were trying to represent and find it. But we didn’t get there because we didn’t know to think with clarity and coherance alright because we had the same low self esteem, and we had the same chaos, so we had the same basic distrust of ourselves. So we behaved by the way they programmed us to behave. This is the way to do this, if you don’t like it and do it this way, do it that way, so we fell into that, so we built our whole thing around how we emotionally believed, rather than how we used our feelings to think clearly and coherently. And not that we didn’t have any accomplishments, because we did have accomplishments, but in the end the way the system works the accomplishments we had, they were just putting something off. We accomplished putting something off because the system keeps grinding away at the same thing, so we may have delayed something, but we didn’t bring any solution. But maybe through new generations we can communicate some understanding about creating reality with the power of their intelligence. See, then maybe this thing can still fall into place. Whatever the harshness of the environment is that we’re in, whatever it is, we should always think of ourselves as human beings, first. We should always think of ourselves as human beings. We need to know who we are. Because the way everything has come down, we don’t think like human beings, we think like by gender, male or female, we think by class, we think by race, we think by religion, we think by politics, but we never think of ourselves as human beings. And we can’t really connect to the reality and the power of our creative imagination and intelligence effectively if we don’t know who we are. We’re human beings. And to me it’s little things like that, just daily reminding ourselves of these things that help all the rest of us to synchronize. And I would say that every day I would suggest that every day you make a communication a prayer whatever you want to call it but I’m saying make a communication with your creator. Number one, always thanking the creator for life, alright, no matter what’s going on we should be able to thank the creator for life. And as a part of that we should thank the Creator for giving us intelligence. Because that’s where we have our ability to create the solutions to the problems that exist. See we’ve just been maladjusted in such a way that we use our creative energies, our creative abilities, and our creative powers, right, basically a lot of way against ourselves. And what we don’t use against ourselves, we use trying to fit into one of their definitions about how to deal with stuff. See so we’re not taking the time to really just think. Think free, ya know. I think everything should be questioned. And believe. In a way believe means I don’t know alright. How many times do you hear that as part of people’s conversation? I believe this. I believe that. Why don’t we say I don’t know this? I don’t know that, because when we’re saying I believe this, I believe that, then we’re just tricking ourselves. It’s better to say I think this, or I think that rather than I believe it because if I’m going to go into the paradigm of belief, then that means I’m not thinking. See, my ability to think is limited by what I believe. So that’s like putting my thinking in a cage. In a box, right. So it kind of neutralizes the thinking process. If we conscientously think or say I think this or I think that, then we’re activating our thinking process. If we go with I believe this, I believe that, then we’re not activating it. That means I don’t have to think about it, because that’s what I believe. And I think everything should be questioned. That’s how we learn. Whatever the problems are and whatever the state of the world is now, so to speak, right, I think that we can change it. I do think that. Because I do understand my own perceptional reality, I understand the reality of power. Power is in how we think. See that’s the reality of power. You know, guns and money and armies, those are things that are access to authority. But they’re not really power. Whoever has the most guns or army that doesn’t make them powerful. What this does is this gives them access to authority. Whoever has the most money, that doesn’t mean they’re powerful. Alright, they manipulated, lied, they did all the things that do not represent power in order to get to authority. So we make these distinctions, understanding of the difference between power and authority. So then we start to get into reality of who we are and what we can do. We can out think them. I know that we can. It’s just a matter of whether we will or not. Is that an answer?
One of the issues I know that is going on currently with, I mean, I think our whole youth generation, is low self-esteem, and I see it in schools, I see it within myself, you know all that kind of stuff. And one of the things that causes it, if it causes me to look up to people to look to like my heroes or the leaders, or look up to certain people, you know that like do seem to have more power or authority over me or something like that. Who should those leaders or our heroes be for us? The youth? Rather than like the supermodels or the magazines that we have right now?
I think for me personally, but at my age because I don’t know what to say for a younger people, right, because my attitude is, I operate from the premise there are no heroes. There are people who do heroic things. And I think maybe to remember that. I mean that is just from my perception. I’m no trying to–but to me there are no heroes, but are people who do heroic things, and some of them may do it repeatedly, right, or just once they may come up. Because to me like people who go, they struggle through extreme poverty or hard times, but yet they keep their family unit together. Well they’re doing an heroic thing, you know, but these people don’t have names that are famous and flashed out there. So that’s why I phrase it like that about people doing heroic things. So it’s hard to say who to look to like that, but I’m going to come back to this other part. What makes sense, makes sense. If it makes sense or if they make sense. Consider what makes sense. And if someones out here and they make a lot of sense, and you relate to that, don’t make them a hero. This is somebody that makes sense. Let them remain a human being, don’t create any pedestals. And listen to them and if they don’t make sense, then don’t listen, right. And people may make sense about some things and not make sense about other things. Well then don’t judge it. Just recognize that while I can trust these people to make sense about this but I can’t trust them to make sense about that. Rather than looking externally, look internal. I want to do the best that I can do. What’s the best that I can do, see and then you’re doing that heroic thing. See, you become that, right. And whoever it is externally that let’s say you would admire right or put it in that kind of way because of who they are, what they represent and things. Well, then follow as much of that path as you can. Right because we have to live it. And this whole thing about the supermodels and all this and that, you know, I look at it, it’s a difficult thing to get people, people that aren’t young people, to understand, you know. Because everybody’s looking externally for something right, and you’re not going to make that go away. But what I do find is rather than try to convince people of anything or rather than try to convince people to go your way, you go your way, alright, and you bring as much coherency and common sense, what makes sense, you bring as much as you can, because this will attract like energy, it’ll help you find like energy. See so look for the energy that’s compatible to yours. And if there are these energy systems out there that aren’t don’t let them engage your energy. Don’t try to convert them. You make the sense that you make. You express your realities and your clarities to the best of your ability. And if somebody doesn’t get it don’t try to argue him into it right, because in the end you can’t trust them. If you’ve got to argue somebody into doing something or talk them into doing something with promises and sweet smiles and things, that means you can’t trust them if things ever really get hard. Because they say they talked me into it, or they smiled me into it. Be real to yourself. Always be real to yourself. Whatever you do, don’t lie to yourself about what you’re doing. And there are many ways we can lie, we can do it through just self justification, self rationalization, many ways we can have our denials. But whatever it is that we do in our lives, we should always be real to ourselves. Even if we got to lie to somebody else about what we’re doing, right. Always be real to ourselves, because this will help us to find that balance. Because then when we are being real to ourselves then that means we’re showing respect to our creator that we’re thanking for life, right. It’s a way of showing respect. How can we respect our creator if we can’t be real to ourselves. And if there are things that we’re not comfortable with accept that that’s a part of who we are. Accept all our parts and participate in this reality as a whole. And if there are parts in us that we’re not really comfortable with and we can’t live with these parts, they’ll evolve out of our thought behaviour pattern. If it’s uncomfortable but we can live with it. then live with it. And just be whole. Be whole as a human being. I don’t know if that answered your question but that’s the answer you got. OK well I’m glad I did this.